Biz Ladies: How to Use Pinterest to Grow Your Business, Part II

Today’s Biz Ladies post is the second part to Katrina Padron’s Pinterest post from last week. In this post, Katrina continues the discussion of Pinterest best practices for growing your business and tackles the topics of optimization, crowdsourcing and analytics. Thanks Katrina for sharing this useful information with us! —Stephanie

Read the full post after the jump…

As I mentioned last week, Pinterest is gaining enormous traction and growth in such a short period of time. With that said, we’ve found ways to use Pinterest to grow your business and build your brand all while adhering to Pinterest’s etiquette.

Check out some of the tips and tricks I offer in Part 1 of this series HERE. And here are a few more ways to continue to grow your Pinterest account and translate that into a growing business.

Overlooked Basics that Could Impact Your Brand

There are so many social networks now, a lot of us start to overlook the basics. Be sure to make your bio fantastic, use a great profile picture and include links to your website. In most cases you can use your Twitter profile for Pinterest, but feel free to spruce it up and have fun too!

Quickly Gain Followers

Like all social media sites we start with zero followers. One way to ramp up your following quickly is to invite people by email using your Yahoo or Google contacts. Pinterest has made this really easy. In the upper right, click Find Friends. When the new page appears, click Invite Friends and a drop down menu will appear. Select your email platform and follow the prompts.

Use the Goodies

It’s important to let people know your are on Pinterest so they know to find you there. A simple way to do this is to add a pin it button to your website. People will be able to go straight from your website to your Pinterest account where they can see more about your brand.

Go to Goodies and scroll to “Follow Button” for Websites. There are a few options available. Select the image you would like and Pinterest will generate code. Paste the code into your website.

The other Goodie that makes Pinterest easy and more likely for you to use is the Install a Pin It bookmarklet to your browser. Follow the step by step instructions. If things are easy to pin, you’ll be more likely to do it.

How Crowdsourcing Can Feature Your Brand without You Selling It

Ask fans of your brand to pin pictures of themselves with their favorite product of yours and tag you, then you can repin those photos onto a VIP board. It’ll show potential customers that your current users really like using your product and it will help build a relationship with your current customers.

Little Known Ways to Optimize Your Pins

Put keywords and hashtags in each description as it relates to your product or service. Users will be more likely to find your pin when searching for something specific if it is optimized. You could put #design #print #damask #wallpaper for a pin about wallpaper.

This gives great research and insight into what is popular and can help direct some of your efforts, so keep an eye on it. It also allows you to comment back to people from one place.

Utilize Pinterest’s Business Tools and Analytics

Pinterest has taken the best components from other social networks and put it into this one. One of the things they’ve done very well over the last year is add business tools. Currently, they are experimenting with Promoted Pins and will be launching that feature soon, but my favorite tool they currently have is Analytics. Don’t you wonder why some pins go viral while others do not? You’ll first need to “Verify Website,” but then you’ll be set to get your analytics. Not only do the analytics show increases in pins and pinners, but the best part is that through the analytics, you can find out what pinners like. The data shows which pins get shared the most, who interacts with them and what else people add alongside them.

We would love to hear other insight you have and things you’ve done on Pinterest to grow your business.

I feel like hashtags don’t fit quite as well with the culture of Pinterest as they do with Twitter (with the exception of pins that are obviously meant as ads) because they call too much attention to the fact that you’re trying to get attention. If the pin description is good—as opposed to just putting a period as people seem to love doing—it should hopefully get picked up by searches (I say “hopefully” because Pinterest’s search algorithm is a complete mystery to me).

I had no idea about the widgets! Thank you so much for this article, and for the series itself! For small business owners trying to get off the ground, these articles are incredibly helpful. Whenever I feel discouraged, these articles remind me it can be done!

Thanks so much for your series of articles. They really helped me to get a clearer insught into Pinterest. I am old school starting a business. The social media sometimes seem like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I need to use this more often

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